My next job was with the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training.  A friend from my days working on The Call hooked me up because he heard that I could speak Spanish.  It was the new administration of Harold Washington.  So there I was – an intake counselor for dislocated workers in the Back of the Yards.

These were the years of mergers and runaway shops.  Our office on 47^th was always tangled up in excessive paper work.  We placed very few of our clients.  Our office was even targeted for an audit because forces opposed to the mayor were trying to strip him of control of the program.  The auditors never found the cases where we actually supplied false documentation.  We had to prove that clients were in fact “dislocated” because of a plant shutdown.

These were the days of Council Wars and our unit was located right in the heart of Alderman Ed Burke’s territory.  Our office was relocated to an out of business industrial warehouse a few blocks south of the former stockyards.  To walk among the unsold inventory was like a tour of the effects of de-industrialization.  There were stacks and stacks of coal shovels, bins and bins of pipes, boxes and boxes of aprons.

On this job, I made some contacts with some coke heads who were working for a Puerto Rican employment agency on the North Side.  These guys referred to one of their offices as “the laundry room” because that’s where they finagled the books.  I flew to Florida with one of them to buy that rock that I was later caught with.  I’m kind of glad there were no state troopers profiling rented cars with two males coming up the cocaine highway out of the gator state.

Overall, I was going through a time of isolation from my own family and friends as well as the dissolution of my political ties.  My dad had died of colon cancer in 1981.  I wonder, now that I am in a similar stage of life, if I could have given him more comfort.  None of us in the family even discussed with him that his days were numbered.

I dug up an old Chicago Tribune headline referring to an injury to the star Marquette quarterback, Gene Ronzani.  It said “Drew May Face Drake”.  His friends had always kidded him about that.  I wanted to give him a smile.  Why couldn’t I have given him, instead, some chances to relive his triumphs?  Now that I have been reflecting so much on the meaning of life and legacy, I realize that he might have enjoyed some appreciation for the many things that he was.  He was a transmission belt from his dad’s generation to all of us, a visionary who actually plotted out a whole new neighborhood in Waukegan, a loving father who prepared the four of us to take on big challenges in life.

I remember a painful exchange in the living room.  “When are you going to get a good job and settle down?”  He was uncharacteristically angry with me.  I knew he was worried about how I would fare when he was not around.  I shot back, “I don’t need your money”.  I left the house heading for the nearest shot and a beer.

One time I announced that I was going to come and stay for a while.  But I stipulated that I would also be repairing my car in Mom and Dad’s garage.  It was something major, like leaf springs or a rear axle.  When I asked Uncle Tom if he would help me, he looked at me like I had asked him to assassinate someone.  With such a medical crisis in the family, Mom and Dad would not put up with any stress caused by me trying – once again – to do more than I really should.

In recent days, I have seen my own sons’ efforts to prove to me —  and to themselves  — that they will do fine after I am gone.  Since my diagnosis, both have stepped up big time in managing family affairs and preparing for manhood.

On the day of my dad’s death, I made it from Chicago just in time to hear the death rattle.  At his wake about six old guys came up to me and said the same thing, “Your dad was my best friend.”

I stayed up all night looking for an appropriate passage from the Bible to print up for his funeral cards.  It was from Psalm 15 about a just man who could not be corrupted:  “He that walks uprightly and works righteousness, and speaks the truth in his heart.  He that backbites not with his tongue, nor does evil to his neighbor, nor spreads a reproach against his neighbor.  In whose eyes a vile person is held in contempt, but he honors them that fear the Lord; he that takes an oath to his own hurt, and changes not.  He that puts not out his money to usury, nor takes a bribe against the innocent.  He that does these things shall never be moved.”

A father is almost like a god to a son.  He is a personification of conscience.  When Dad left us, I was cast even more adrift.  I was more able to tolerate new levels of amorality.